Dr. Francesca Musiani, ISD’s Yahoo! Fellow, hosted an all-day conference on Internet governance and infrastructure on Friday, April 19, 2013 in collaboration with the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, the Yahoo! Fund on Communication Technology, International Values, and the Global Internet, American University’s School of International Service, and the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet).

The “invisible” infrastructures of the Internet’s lower layers – addresses, protocols, domain names – are increasingly used to serve political objectives different from the purpose they were initially designed for. Are we currently experiencing a “turn to infrastructure” for Internet governance?

This conference explored the political, social and technical implications of this recent tendency, by focusing on a particularly controversial aspect of Internet infrastructure: the Domain Name System, the Internet’s “phone book.”

Who We Are Looking For: Professionals from the fields of journalism, non-governmental organization, academia and the private sector with proven record in performing high-quality interviews and desk research, meeting deadlines, and promptly responding to queries as part of a large research team. Interested candidates, including those colleagues who have worked with us before, should apply online by visiting http://www.tfaforms.com/279604no later than April 20th.

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Global Integrity is embarking on a partnership with the World Wide Web Foundation to prepare the 2013 Web Index. The Web Index is the first multi-dimensional measure of the Web’s use, utility and impact. In 2012, the Web Index covered 61 developed and developing countries, incorporating indicators that assess the political, economic and social impact of the Web; in 2013 coverage will be increased to roughly 80 countries. The Web Index is a tool that helps advocates and policy analysts draw upon actionable measures to identify impediments and track improvements in Web access and affordability. The Web Index also helps inform decision-makers and regulators as to what changes can be made to Web governance in country to help achieve greater and more sustainable development outcomes.

This effort will require a global team of reporters and reviewers around the world to conduct original research and data gathering that will feed into the final 2013 Web Index. For information on the requirements and how to apply, please see the Fact Sheet below.

A big problem in sharing even excellent, well-sourced information on the theme of pedophiles occupying the highest ranks of organizations, whether they be corporate, governmental or even religious, is not the sense of incredulity such information usually provokes in typically asleep middle-class readers who have lived relatively protected, cocooned existences oblivious to the innumerable black undersides of what some call reality. That’s to be expected from those who live in middle-class cocoons. The real difficulty is in examining and sharing information on practices that are unarguably loathsome, depraved, vile, degenerate and in essence evil, and done by people we look upon as our highest and most respectable leaders. It’s easy to accuse someone of evil, and it is insufficient by itself to do so. One has to provide evidence, and providing evidence entails describing something ineffably malign and almost unutterable in its horror – that’s hard to do, by comparison, because except for those with a strong appetite or attraction to very, very dark things, a minority, no one else, understandably, wants to look at such things. People flee from what repels them, and what is more repellent than pederasts, especially those who have great power and privilege?

This undoubtedly largely has to do with living in a dominantly secular age. The influence of those who don’t believe in a Divine Order or God is pervasive enough to compel the masses to assume the flip side: to take for granted there is no Devil, no source of deep, abiding non-human evil. Anything conveyed about people and their practices that smacks of a quality or degree of evil that puts the smug assumptions of modernity into doubt, that makes the Satanic much more plausible despite the stubborn persistence of modernity’s assumptions about good and evil, is an object of terror and revulsion to the degree that modernity’s values has descended into people’s hearts and minds. Not that religious “authorities” can be counted on to protect innocent children. Note the Catholic Church’s endless calls to stop abortion, which victimizes innocent children, they say, which is all well and good, but its compulsive, monotonic repetition of this meme seems to be a sign of a compensatory spilling-out of a guilty conscience for having permitted and protected the many pederast priests in its midst. They seem to ignore the more concrete or real crime in exchange for protesting the more abstract one when it comes to their most repeated phrase: innocent children. This happens likely because the real crime is done by their very own, at the center of power and control in the Church, by priests and their bishops.

For these and other reasons, getting the message out about pedophiles who are very powerful is more challenging and daunting than getting out information on any other category of crimes performed by members of the Elite. Yet the task should be done, if only as a microscopic, belated effort to help get some chance of justice for the countless and truly innocent children victimized and even tortured and killed by pederasts, especially those in the highest places, plus to help prevent new such crimes by the high and mighty especially.